sounding for all the world like the click of giant croquet balls. I went
round to the rear of the house and looked out of the kitchen windows to
the lines. A little action, some quarrel of sentries, perhaps, was going
on behind the trees, just where the wooded ridge sloped to the river.
Trench light after trench light rose, showing the disused railroad track
running across the un-harvested fields. Gleaming palely through the
French window at which I was standing, the radiance revealed the
deserted kitchen, the rusty stove, the dusty pans, and the tarnished
water-tap above the stone sink. The hard, wooden crash of grenades broke
upon my ears.

My own room was lit by the yellow flame of a solitary candle, rising,
untroubled by the slightest breath of wind, straight into the air. A
large rug of old-rose covered the floor, an old-rose velvet canopy
draped a long table, hanging down at the corners in straight, heavy
creases, and the wallpaper was a golden yellow with faint stripes of
silvery-gray glaze. By the side of the wooden bed stood a high cabinet
holding about fifty terra-cotta and porcelain figurines, shiny
shepherdesses with shiny pink cheeks, Louis XV peasants with rakes on
their shoulders, and three little dogs made of a material the color of
cocoa. The gem of the collection was an eighteenth-century porcelain of
a youth and a maid sitting on opposite sides of a curved bench over
whose center rose a blossoming bush. The youth, dressed in black, and
wearing yellow stockings, looked with an amorous smile at the girl in
her gorgeous dress of flowering brocade.

A marbly-white fireplace stood in the corner, overhung by a great Louis
XV mirror with a gilt frame of rich, voluptuous curves. On the mantel
lay a scarf of old-rose velvet smelling decidedly musty. Alone, apart,
upon this mantel, as an altar, stood a colored plaster bust of Jeanne